Casting About

Beginning to understand

I find fishing addictive, mostly because of how it makes me feel. There is nothing like the sudden explosion on the surface as a bass breaks through the vegetation to explode on a plastic frog. It’s not for the weak at heart. But lately, I’ve been feeling something else when I fish.

Always looking for an opportunity to wet a line, I recently extended an invitation to my wife, Diana, and my 4 ½ year daughter, Maya, to spend a few hours on the lake. We hooked up the boat, grabbed a couple dozen nightcrawlers and hit the water. Boasting a smile from ear to ear, Maya loved it. She screamed, “go faster, go faster” over the passing wind, soon arriving at our two-hour paradise.

It didn’t take long for the hand-sized bream and smallmouth to find her split-shot rig. Repeatedly she would reel them in and jump with excitement. While marveling over her catch, she impatiently listened to my explanations and posed for photos all the while anxious to get her line back in the water.

It all took me back to my childhood, my feet hanging off the dock at my grandfather’s pond waiting for a fish to take my bobber under. As I proudly hoisted my catch, dad would remove the hook so I could to do it again and again.

“Aren’t you going to fish?” I always asked.

“You go ahead, I am doing just fine,” always his response.

I can still hear his voice. “One day when you get older you are going to understand,” he would say about so many things. Like a typical adolescent, I patronized him with a head nod then went right back to pressing my point from the wealth of wisdom gleaned during my short life. And as the story goes he was right; I am finally beginning to understand.

I am not exactly sure when this epiphany of parental wisdom began its infiltration. Often there are landmarks in life I can easily use as justification for “flip-flopping.” However, this transformation I am going through can’t be reduced to a single event or happenstance, and quite frankly is much more serious.

There is said to be five stages in hunting. Each with a different factor used to determine “successful hunting.” A hunter’s age and experience affects his/her definition. At stage 1 the hunter wants to pull the trigger as much as possible while a stage 3-hunter measures satisfaction in terms of selectivity of game or “trophy.” The sportsman stage is the final destination defining success through the total hunting experience. Things like hiking in the mountains or the camaraderie of your family and friends takes precedence over harvesting game.

Fishing is much the same way. I know I have certainly mellowed over the years. Priorities have changed. Suddenly the sunrise and sunset, wildlife and landscape, are now all important elements of a day on the water. I still love catching fish, but more and more I feel that I am coming in tune with the true essence and the totality of the outdoor experience.

There have been a lot of role models who showed up throughout the different stages of my fishing, and now I get to do the same for Maya. It was a great feeling to be out fishing with my daughter, and certainly the best heart-therapy available. I can only hope this experience will find a permanent place in her memory and foster a desire to share the outdoors with the next generation.

As we motored back to the boat ramp, I couldn’t help but smile with anticipation thinking to myself, I finally understand, and now I get to help Maya discover what I have learned.